Nicholas Stuart is a columnist with the Canberra Times.
Nick Stuart has written three books,
Kevin Rudd: An Unauthorised Political Biography;
What Goes Up: Behind the 2007 Election; and
Rudd's Way: November 2007 - June 2010.

Monday, July 16, 2012

FEMINISM ONE

I made a significant mistake in this column. I accidentally suggest, three-quarters of way down, that the really important things in existence are "living the good life, having children, and being a real contributor".

Of course you don't need to have children to live a good life, and I apologise for the implied linkage . . .

FEMINISM FOR BEGINNERS, OR, ‘HAVING IT ALL’

When Anne-Marie Slaughter –
formerly at the US State Department and Hillary Clinton’s top policy advisor–
chronicles the obstacles that still stand in the way of a woman who wants to
work in a serious policy job, it’s difficult not to become angry. Very angry.

It turns out Slaughter found that
she couldn’t have it all. That’s why she’s been forced to return to academe. She
bared her reasons in a brutally honest piece for The Atlantic. Instead of
meetings at the White House and cocktail parties at the UN in Manhattan, after
two years at the top Slaughter found her work/life balance was so out-of-whack
she decided to return to lecturing at Princeton. That’s slumming it?

What you see depends on where you
look. Wearing her feminist shades, Slaughter envisages only too clearly the
obstacles standing in the way of a woman seeking both a happy and contented
family life and satisfying professional career. Quite naturally she ‘gendered’
the issue. Her analysis begins – and ends – with social structures based around
the sex of participants.

It’s a biting critique. And a
very real one. Nothing in this column should be taken as dismissing her
concerns. But there are other ways of analysing this situation that speak far
more deeply to me. Using these perspectives it’s difficult not to think
Slaughter’s conclusions rather shallow. Perhaps her chauffer, waiting in the
limousine for her to finish sipping champagne and chatting to high-ranking
diplomats so she could be whisked to a high-speed train back to her family in
Boston, might possess different insights into balancing work and life. Maybe the
young middle-class black girl who studies hard and does well at school but knows
she’ll never, ever, be able to enter the privileged Ivy League college that
Slaughter teaches at might have other ideas about discrimination too.

Slaughter’s analysis is accurate
and understandable. It results from the way she perceives the world. But gender
(or ethnicity, or social background) aren’t the only ways to deconstruct the
workings of society. Slaughter’s world embraces power relations and the material
trappings flowing from them as a natural part of human society. These aren’t
issues to her. Instead, she’s worried about institutional factors that prevent
her (an obviously deserving candidate) from “having it all”. She decides, in a
confused sort of way, that feminism hasn’t lived up to its promise.

Perhaps she’s looking at the
world from the wrong perspective. Self-evidently, only one person can become
the ‘number three’ at State. That’s what hierarchies are all about. Bosses and
minions. Getting to be number one. Slaughter’s fundamental mistake is to believe
this has any correlation with fulfilment or satisfaction. Work is actually nothing
more than a job. It’s just an occupation.

If you’ve got a good job then
working’s fun. If you’re earning heaps of money, that’s probably fun too. I
wouldn’t know. But work, alone, is not the reason for existence. It’s difficult
to plot the precise moment we began equating the meaning of life with wealth.
Having money’s always been important and having more (and more) has been a
driving passion for most people at some time or another. But this desire is
like a child wanting more toys who discovers nothing will ever replace their
‘special’ first teddy. The cost of a bauble is no guarantee it will be
appreciated. Nevertheless, slowly we’re weaned off such toys until we desire
the faster car; the bigger house. Eventually, we become full participants in
consumer culture.

Which is all very well. After
possessing a ‘media room’ it’s not too long before you can’t do without one.
But materialism can be a bit like power. The number three hopes to be number
two, and it’s never long before someone with a 42” screen wants, no needs, to
swap to a 102” display. That’s great if you can afford it – but is sitting
alone in luxury really more satisfying than dinner and a movie with friends?
The great thing is to independently work out what your priorities are, and
achieve them.

So. The first point is to
recognise that money (or power, or position) isn’t everything. Being a woman
didn’t stop Slaughter from achieving the really important things in existence:
living the good life, having children, and being a real contributor. The far
more important point is, however, that not everyone gets that chance.
Increasingly Australia, like America, is marked by disparities of wealth and
(perhaps more importantly) opportunity.

Andrew Leigh, Labor member for
Fraser (North Canberra) and former ANU academic, still specialises in these
issues. He says there’s no doubt that, year after year; the top ten percent of
income earners have taken home an increasing amount of the national pay-packet.
This disparity appears to have acted as a stimulus to overall growth – which is
good. It’s a trend that’s stretched across the English-speaking world, like the
share of national wealth taken home by the top one percent. This has been on an
uncontested and dramatic upward trend in the US, Canada and UK, as well as
here; in fact, everywhere apart from New Zealand (which any growth-focussed
obsessive would dismiss as a ‘basket-case’ economy anyway, although one with
good ski-slopes).

The real issue is: how difficult
is it to change your circumstances? Leigh makes the point that where you’re
born shouldn’t determine your life chances, yet increasingly this appears to be
the case. “If we’re all born climbing the ladder of opportunity”, he says, “it’s
much harder to get up if the rungs are further apart”. Data on social
inequality has suggested (in the past) that immigrants can do well. Frank Lowy
would probably agree. But Leigh points out there are long lags in the
statistics and very different levels of mobility across dissimilar migrant
groups. The opportunities experienced by Jewish refugees in the 1940’s or by
some Vietnamese families in the ‘80’s might not be experienced by Lebanese in
the ‘90’s or Afghans today.

Between 1975 and 1999, social
mobility changed in Australia. For the worse. The situation hasn’t altered
since then: if anything, it would appear to have become much worse. The
government’s copping a lot of anger and pain at the moment, more, I suspect,
than can be explained by Julia Gillard’s personal style alone. If, as Wayne
Swan keeps telling us, we’re the “envy of the world” it’s remarkable this isn’t
reflected in the polls. No government in the past has ever faced the sort of
electoral oblivion likely to encompass Labor when the economy’s been as robust
as it is today.

Which makes one suspect that the
figures the Treasurer keeps waving in our faces are irrelevant. It’s opportunity
that people want, and they increasingly feel this is being denied.

3 comments:

I'm afraid I don't even know what metro-sexual means and there are, I suspect, a rather large number of my acquaintances that would be somewhat surprised at the idea I'd ever been mistaken for a feminist . . .